DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF

A son grows up and away.

Novelist, memoirist, and Guggenheim Fellow Julavits offers a touching meditation on time, motherhood, and memory centered on four years, beginning when her 6-year-old son slowly, fitfully emerges from childhood. She calls those years “the end times,” marking his growing independence and her own unsettling loss of feeling deeply connected and needed. “Before,” she writes, “I was accumulating experiences; now, on certain days, it feels like all I’m accumulating is the experience of losing the experiences I’d gained.” As her son became increasingly drawn to his peers, she observed that around some other boys, his behavior changed in response to “the energy of the group”; he shared the excitement of video games not with her, but with his friends. The author felt like she was “left out and I hate to be left out. I’m also excluded from learning. He’s gaining specific knowledge about a new world and I’m not.” As he moved forward to adulthood, Julavits found herself ruminating about the past: teaching at Columbia, a monthlong stay in Florence with her children when her husband had to return home unexpectedly, her pregnancies and the births of her two children, and growing up on the rugged coast of Maine. “It’s sometimes hard to know whose childhood I’m missing anymore,” she reflects, “my children’s or mine.” Her son’s maturing also urged her to think about how she could prepare him for moral complexities surrounding gender and sexuality. Despite his growing resistance, she refused to cut his hair, causing him to be mistaken, often, for a girl. Yet she is convinced that long hair produces nutrients that promote “greater intelligence, heightened empathy, kindness, intuition, and the ability to sense enemies,” qualities she knows will serve him well. “For him,” she writes, “I am no longer his sole point of orientation and will never be again. He will not always be mine.”

Affecting reflections on life’s transitions.